Flyrod Brook Trout

For the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked for the Public Works department in my hometown. After a month on the garbage truck I was upgraded - as my supervisor put it - to the city’s sewer truck. Partnered with Troy, the regular operator of the big blue hose-and-vacuum rig designed to clear a block’s worth of filth from the pipes which ran under the city streets, I was elevated to the esteemed position of Assistant Sewer Truck Operator.

On a daily basis, from June until August, I ran the orange hose on the PTO-powered coil up and down the sanitary sewer lines, blasted all the cling-ons from the side of the pipes, sucked all the crap out of the bottom of the manhole with the giant vac and shined a flashlight on the junction below to make sure all was clear before doing it all over again a block away.

It was a dirty, stinky, greasy job, but at the same time, it was kind of fun. Save for the morning when the hydraulic line ruptured and the truck started on fire, nearly melting the propane hose on the just-filled, 100-pound propane tank with no overflow protection device on it. I don’t know how close the town came to losing the pizza factory that we were operating in front of that day, but I’m pretty sure the valley would have smelled like pepperoni for a week or two had Troy not rushed up the block, grabbed an extinguisher from the auto parts store and returned just in time to put the fire out.

“I bet you’re glad you’re going on vacation tomorrow,” Troy said, as we replaced the melted hoses and burnt couplings under the truck later that afternoon.

Boy was I ever. My family had planned a road trip around a convention my dad attended on an annual basis throughout most of the 1990s. That summer, the meetings were in Sun Valley, Idaho, and I had spent two weeks pouring over maps of the trout streams that ran closest to our hotel. One flow was listed as a good fishing stream with a large pond at its headwaters. As soon as we were checked in, my younger brother Ben and I were off to fish it.
We knew very little about trout fishing at the time, so on the way to the stream we stopped in at a tackle shop and purchased a selection of flies and a handful of spinners for our spinning rods. With a bag full of new tackle, we hopped back in the family truckster and I drove along the winding road into the summer-green foothills.

A brown and white public access sign guided us down toward the pool where we could see a small spring bubbling out of the hillside. I parked the minivan and we grabbed our gear and celebrated the fact that we were the only anglers at the small pond. From the shore, we gazed down into the aquamarine water, which was so clear we could see the bottom from nearly every vantage point. We were also able to clearly view the green-backed rainbow trout that cruised around in the crystalline waters.

For about an hour, I flailed away with the fly rod, trying my damnedest to make it work; hindered by my inexperience and the combination of some enormous dragonfly imitation on the end of the bright orange line and a tippet that seemed as thick as a telephone wire. I watched in frustration as each cast unfolded into a series of S-curves and the trout scattered beneath my line when it smacked the water. Meanwhile, my brother offered up a bright yellow Worden’s Roostertail again and again on the opposite side of the pond. He met with the same amount of success I did, until fifteen minutes after I had given up on the fly rod and went back to my more traditional gear, he hollered when a cast finally connected.

By the time I made it to him the other side; he had the fish splashing next to shore. He bent down and held it up in the sunlight.

It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Its back was a mixture of dark and light green, like how a pine forest looks on a clear morning. Its sides were an iridescent olive backdrop set alight by rings of orange and periwinkle fireworks that seemed to burst as the sunlight shined on the fish. Its underside sported five shades of red and solid white stripes extending to the tip of each fin.

“Is it a rainbow trout?” he asked, as he revived the fish in the shallows before it scooted back into the depths of the pond.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, still awestruck in the Creator’s ability to combine so many colors on the eleven-inch canvas.

Having no idea what species the fish was, I headed back to the van with Ben to find the Idaho fishing regulations booklet. In the middle of the manual were Joseph Tomelleri’s renderings of all sorts of fish, from the species we were familiar with like bass, walleye and pike to the half-dozen or so depictions of various trout found in Idaho’s waters. Scanning through them, I found Ben’s fish. It was a brook trout.

As we made our way back to the pond, he told the story leading up to the catch. Ben revealed that the brookie had come after his spinner several times, short-striking on a few retrieves, before he finally connected with the single-hooked lure. The other trout that cruised by paid little attention to the lure, but the brookie was always interested.
Three young anglers joined us shortly thereafter and revealed that the secret to catching the stocked rainbow trout in the pond was an old one – plain hooks, split shot and a can of Green Giant niblets. While they landed a good number of rainbows, I never saw a brook trout come to hand; and I have yet to see it happen again.

The grace at work in the coloration of Ben’s brookie from the tiny pond in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outshined the blackness of all the grease, grime and God-knows-what that I dealt with as I finished out my job on the sewer truck that summer. I carry that scene of my brother, holding the fish up on the shore of the spring-fed pool with me as I once again pour over likely stream maps and plan my spring trout fishing trips, one of which will hopefully bring me a brook trout of my own…in our outdoors.